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Pack up some files into a tarball on a remote server without writing to the local filesystem
I recently found myself with a filesystem I couldn't write to and a bunch of files I had to get the hell out of dodge, preferably not one at a time. This command makes it possible to pack a bunch of files into a single archive and write it to a remote server.

Rename files with vim.
Opens a list of files in a text editor. Using Vim as your default editor allows you to use the power of regex substitution and visual block mode to batch rename files. Found in the renameutils package sudo apt-get install renameutils

Find the package that installed a command

Load your [git-controlled] working files into the vi arglist.
Branch name may be substituted, of course.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Clone perms and owner group from one file to another
Copy both perms and owner group from one file to another.

Copy sparse files
This causes cp to detect and omit large blocks of nulls. Sparse files are useful for implying a lot of disk space without actually having to write it all out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file You can use it in a pipe too: $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=5 |cp --sparse=always /dev/stdin SPARSE_FILE

View a sopcast stream
Get sopcast links for live sports from http://myp2p.eu (for example) Get sp-sc or sp-auth binary by googling (sopcast + linux) eg http://www.jbg.f2s.com/sp-sc.gz Requires the 32bit libstdc++5 package. After exiting mplayer, type 'killall sp-sc'

List only the directories
to include hidden dirs use: $ tree -adL 1 (with ls, requires 'ls -ad */ .*/')

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.


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